Regret

The Enhanced Editions of the Infinity Engine games continue to impress. I recently completed my second playthrough of the seminal RPG Planescape: Torment, this time with Beamdog's Enhanced Edition interpretation of the game. Unlike the Baldur's Gate series, which I've previously played with heavily-modded non-EE editions, my only prior experience with PST was the completely unmodded (but patched) original Black Isle release.

The EE works great out of the box, and I think I'll recommend new players to stick with it. As with the BG EE versions, it has widescreen support, better UI controls, and tons of small quality-of-life improvements. It is unfortunately missing a couple of the current improvements from Siege Of Dragonspear-era EE games; the one I missed much was icons on the character portraits that show each characters' currently queued action, which is extremely helpful for keeping track of spellcasting and ammunition. I suspect this is because the PST UI has always been so unique and custom, and it's probably hard to keep that compelling visual look and feel while also streamlining and improving its functionality.

PST's modding scene has always been significantly smaller than the BG series, likely because its story is so personal and it doesn't have the open world feeling of the Amnish portions of BG2, which gracefully incorporated vast quantities of user-created stories. That said, I did install a few mods for this playthrough. PST:EE fully supports the classic Weidu mod structure, and installation is easy: just download each mod and unzip it into the program folder (easily found on Steam by opening Properties for the game and selecting Browse Local Files), then double-click the mod EXE and follow the prompts.

1. Unfinished Business. This is a bit smaller than the BG version but still has a lot of "new" quests. Most of these are are things that were written/programmed by Black Isle and shipped with the original PST release, but were inaccessible in the game due to bugs, being incomplete or being intentionally removed. The mod adds them back in, fixes any related bugs, and in some cases adds some original content to fill in any still-missing parts.
2. Journal Portrait Conversations. PST actually has great, high-resolution images for almost all of the characters and monsters you encounter over the course of the game, but they're buried deep in the Bestiary, which many people never open and nobody views more than once. This mod updates the UI so you can see the portrait of the character you're speaking to instead of, uh, nothing. This makes it much more like the BG games and, in my opinion, adds a lot of atmosphere to the game.
3. Auto Detect Traps. Fantastic little quality-of-life mod: whenever Annah isn't fighting or in stealth, she automatically starts looking for traps. Traps are one of the most persistent annoyances of the IE game, and this mod makes them a little more bearable.
4. Banter Accelerator. Unlike the BG games, the banters in vanilla PST have unrealistically short timers; even in a 100% completionist playthrough, most players will only hear a tiny fraction of the available banters, and because they're generally delivered in the same order, even on multiple replays you'll re-hear the same few. Installing this mod (default settings are OK) gives you periodic banters that are still nicely spaced out and lets you hear fantastic voice acting from Jennifer Hale, Keith David, Dan Castellaneta, and the other great talent in your party.
5. Generalized Biffing. This is very important to install if you are using Unfinished Business, the Tweak Pack or any mods that add or change content in the game (NPCs, items, etc.). There's a relatively new bug that was introduced in a newish EE version that causes previously-visited maps to be reset after visiting the Modron Maze, which can lead to duplicated characters, impassable doors or other game-breaking bugs. Existing PST:EE mod guides won't mention this unless they've been updated recently. It's important to install Generalized Biffing last after all other mods. You can re-install it multiple times if you add more mods afterwards. If you do run into the bug, you will need to install this mod and then reload a save before the Modron Maze.

None of these are essential for a first playthrough, but I think all of them are OK, nothing really spoils the game. The Banter Accelerator was especially nice. I increasingly think that semi-voiced text-heavy RPGs like this may be my favorite style of RPG. It really helps bring the characters to life, giving you a fantastic sense of their personality and style, while keeping the game quick to read and never annoying.

It's been... wow, 13 years since the last time I played this game. PS:T is both less and more replayable than most RPGs. It's notable for having a predefined protagonist: you can't select your gender or race or background, you are always The Nameless One and have the same history. But you have more agency than in most RPGs as you progress through the game, with a large number of choices that impact the evolution of the plot. And not just the plot; PS:T is interesting in that a lot of mechanical aspects of the game are driven by dialogue rather than interface. In Baldur's Gate games, you select your PC's alignment from a drop-down menu when rolling a new chararacter; in PS:T, your alignment is determined based on your actions during the game. In Baldur's Gate you choose a class at chargen and maybe select a dual-class in the Level Up menu; in PS:T, you must complete a series of quests to meet a trainer and decide in conversation with them whether to adopt a new profession.

My memory is understandably fuzzy, but I believe that I stayed a single-class Fighter for my entire original playthrough of PS:T. There are some good reasons for this. Unlike BG games, you can't change your party's formation order, so The Nameless One (henceforth TNO) will usually be in front when you meet enemies, so he will likely be the first party member attacked; he's also vastly more resilient at taking damage and recovering from death than your compatriots, all of which incentivizes you to toss him into the meat grinder with hand-to-hand combat.

This time, I focused on my Mage levels, kind of. This has more synergy with my desired stat allocations: to get the most story out of the game, you want to focus on your mental attributes of Wisdom, Intelligence and Charisma, none of which are useful for fighters; your dump stats end up being Strength, Constitution and Dexterity, all of which are essential for fighters.

Some of your companions in PS:T are multiclass, which behave the same way as in the BG series: XP is evenly distributed between the two classes, leading to slightly slower leveling but more flexibility and utility. One companion is a Fighter/Mage multi, and another is a Thief/Fighter, giving you pretty much everything you need. TNO, though, behaves differently from either dual-classing or multi-classing in BG. After unlocking a new class, you can switch to it in dialogue at pretty much any time by talking with the right party member. You can switch back and forth without any penalty. While a given class, you can use all of that class's skills and none of the other class's. For example, you can only cast spells while you are a Mage, can only pick locks while you're a Thief, and can only wield a battleaxe while you're a Fighter. But, you keep all of the HP, THAC0, saving throws and weapon skills that you've earned in other classes, even after leaving that class.

So, my approach was to take Fighter levels first to beef up my HP and be more resilient, then switch to Mage to get powerful spells for the end-game. My leveling looked like this.

1. I remained a Fighter up until Level 6. This gives 60+ HP and several weapon skill points. Unlock the Mage class during this time so you can switch out of Fighter at will.
2. Work with a Trainer to spend your weapon skill points. Edged weapons are best since they can be used by mages; remember to keep enough points in reserve for higher-level trainers, but you can only train up to the third pip without specializing as a Fighter. Extra skills can probably go into Fists.
3. Level as a Mage up to Level 7. This gives you the first Mage Specialization, which eventually leads to some great stat bonuses. Note that you'll only gain an extra +1 HP for the levels you've previously earned as a Fighter.
4. It's worth briefly dipping into Thief; don't actually play the game as one, but you'll gain a couple of free levels and gain some XP that wouldn't otherwise be available by chatting with Annah while you're a thief and training with her. This gives a couple more HP.
5. Switch back to a Fighter and continue leveling to Level 9. This gives you the most bang-for-your-buck HP wise; after level 9 the Fighter gets 3 HP per level instead of 10. A Mage still gets 4 HP at level 10, which is the one level where it out-earns the Fighter.
6. Switch back to a Mage and play the rest of the game here. It may feel a little slow at first to catch up to your Fighter levels, but the XP scales significantly later in the game so you'll quickly surpass it.

Oh: Why all this focus on hitpoints? Well, because there's a lot of fighting in this game! PS:T has the reputation of an RPG where you can solve all your problems by talking instead of combat, at that's how I've remembered it for years, but that isn't actually how it works. Playing through this again, I thought that it actually felt a lot like Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines. As in that game, the early parts of the game tend to be very talk-heavy and offer a variety of peaceful ways to resolve most (no all) quests, but the later parts of the game are very focused on fighting, so you can't ignore combat build and strategy. That said, fighting is also significantly easier than Baldur's Gate, so you definitely don't need to min-max. But those HP do come in handy.

In that first playthrough, I was Chaotic Good. I didn't have a particular alignment in mind for this game, and was Neutral Good from fairly early on. Maybe around the midpoint of the game, I decided that I wanted to become Lawful Good for mechanical reasons: there are a couple of powerful items that are only usable for characters of that alignment. From that point on, I exclusively chose Lawful options in dialogue: Making and keeping promises, vowing to do things, never lying, etc. This wasn't enough, and I remained Neutral Good through the remainder of the game. I am kind of curious if some of my non-dialogue actions gave me Chaotic points: I never pickpocketed during the whole game, but there were some times I would have Annah pickpocket and loot chests in unoccupied homes. Or maybe I was borderline Chaotic Good before I changed course and there just weren't enough Lawful points left in the second half of the game to get me back on track. It wasn't a huge deal, but was slightly disappointing.

MINI SPOILERS
 
Given the decade-plus between playthroughs, I probably shouldn't be as surprised as I am at just how much I've forgotten. These days, I usually try to do an initial playthrough of an RPG game with as little help as possible; on subsequent replays, I'm much more lenient about consulting walkthroughs and wikis and stuff. I'm a little ambivalent about that. It does feel good to know that I hit all the content that I wanted to see in the game and didn't miss anything interesting or fun, but I am constantly spoiling myself about what's going to happen next, which takes away some of the magic. Once I know the "right" or "best" way to do something, I'll always do it that way, which is mechanically the best but removes the messy drama from the game.

Even with occasional consultations of walkthroughs, there were vast swaths of the game that I have no recollection of at all. It is kind of curious what parts of the game I remember and what I don't. I have pretty strong memories of the Mortuary, and Talks-With-Trees, and the Brothel of Slaking Intellectual Lusts, and the conversation with Ravel, and the Lazy of Pain's mazes, and the Modron Maze; but everything related to Pharod and his bronze sphere felt 100% new to me, as did Trias's arc and Deionarra and the Godsmen and the Sensates.

I do remember being surprised at recruiting Nodrom and Vhailor and being mildly bummed at needing to abandon party members in other planes, so this time around I planned ahead and made a five-person party before heading to the Modron Maze and Curst. I left Ignis behind when picking up Nodrom; he had been in my party through to the end game in my first play-through, and with a TNO Mage and Dakkon I didn't feel like I needed yet another mage. Choosing who to ditch the second time was harder; I was actually tempted to just not recruit Vhailor at all, but ended up leaving Morte behind, planning to pick him back up; this is mostly because he had the most XP at the time of my departure and so would be the quickest to level back up after my return. That said... you gain SO MUCH XP during the Curst / Carceri sojourn that he ended up being completely eclipsed by even my lowest-experienced party members. But, again: this game is pretty easy! So I still swapped him back in for the endgame, just so I could get his dialogue this time around. I'm glad that I did. It turns out that Morte and Dakkon, the two members I had removed during my first playthrough, are probably the two with the most to say in the endgame.

I still have never set foot inside UnderSigil, the bonus dungeon you can reach from the Clerk's Ward. There aren't any plots leading you toward it, and from what I can tell it's mostly a monster-fighting zone, similar to the Modron Maze. I'd intended to include this in a more-completionist playthrough, but I was getting antsy for the endgame so I skipped it yet again. Perhaps next time! From what I've read it scales somewhat to your level, so it might be interesting to check it out both before and after Curst.

My "romance" memories were very fuzzy, but consulting my ancient blog post revealed that I had focused on Annah in my first game, so in this game I chose Fall-From-Grace instead. The romance "content" seemed scarce or missing, and I was curious if I had messed it up, but some cursory Googling indicates that there really is a disparity between the two: neither is as involved as the long arcs in Baldur's Gate 2, but Annah's does at least include a kiss, while FFG's is much more subtle. These relationships have always been pretty intriguing to me; my reaction to video game romance is usually "more, more, more!", but I think these stories and personalities are very evocative with less. Again, I think a lot of it comes down to having a predefined protagonist. One of the things that threw me off in this playthrough was a lot of dialogue indicating that Annah had strong feelings for me, even after I had made the "right" choices to pursue FFG (kissing Ravel while she was in FFG's form, declaring my feelings for her in the maze, etc.). I thought that something had gone "wrong"... but it hadn't, or at least not any more than things do in real life. Annah simply had unrequited feelings for me. I don't think I've seen something like that in the more modern RPG romances I've played: you may flirt with multiple people, but once you select an exclusive partner everyone else gets selective amnesia. Here, things strung out in a really interesting way, with Annah attracted to TNO, TNO pining from FFG, and FFG acknowledging his feelings but not fully reciprocating them. (There are a few lines near the very very end of the "good" ending where she seems to return the romance, but even these are ambiguous and uncertain.) Anyways, this was all interesting to play and makes me think yet again about what types of stories I want to tell. "Traditional" romances are the most satisfying to me, but complicated and incomplete ones can be more thought-provoking.

I'd initially called out PST for being one of the more macabre and gross games that I'd played. It didn't really strike me that way this time around, and I'm not sure whether that's due to me being more desensitized in general or just being mentally prepared for this game. There is a lot of literal viscera in this game: plucking your eyeball out of your socket, digging in your intestines for a key, grabbing a dismembered arm and swinging it like a club. But weirdly enough it doesn't really feel mean-spirited or sinister. It's gross, sure, but I think there are actually fewer scenes of, say, torture or sadism in PST than there are in either Baldur's Gate game.

MEGA SPOILERS

That sense of viscera is one of a few things that has changed in my mind over the years. Much like how I mis-remember this as being a game without much combat, I also remember it as being a game with tons of choice and consequences. It feels like one, but isn't really, at least not in the sort of branching-storyline sense that we've had for the last decade or so. You do literally select tons of choices during the game, but they're almost always in dialogue; there are relatively few actions that have any sort of meaningful consequences outside of the quest in which they occur. There are many alignment shifts and rewards over the course of the game, but these almost never unlock alternate solutions. Gameplay-wise, the major mechanic is increasing your character stats (on level-up or, occasionally, as a reward for completing a quest a certain way), and then using your higher Intelligence or Wisdom or Charisma to get better solutions to future quests.

There's really just one road that you follow: while you're free to pursue early quests in Sigil in various orders, everything from Curst onward runs more or less on rails. Now that I think about it, there aren't even many of those "This is how I feel / why I'm doing this" dialogue choices that I've gotten used to in games like Dragon Age and Shadowrun. You can still say that, but it will be you the player, not your avatar. (And, again, this feels fine within the game, perhaps because TNO is a predefined character.) The story is still powerful, of course. I had vaguely remembered that late in the game there's a belated in-game explanation of why it actually isn't awesome that you resurrect each time you die. I was right: because you are immortal, every time you are supposed to die, someone else dies in your place. They turn into a shadow, and the shadows you encounter during the game are the shades of those who unwillingly died for you. In the Fortress of Regrets, there are a lot of shadows.

It's all pretty sad. After your party is separated, you see each of them killed off by The Transcendent One (henceforth TTO), and you must step across their corpses to reach your adversary. (I think I was subconsciously stealing from this dynamic in my initial ultra-dark plan for the finale to CalFree in Chains.) An answer is proffered for the game's infamous question: regret can change the nature of a man. (Which, as I've mulled over after finishing the game, feels right to me. Other potential answers like love and anger and hardship can change your behavior; but regret prompts introspection, a desire to change, and the willingness to make those changes). The big-picture story becomes clearer: Your wicked deeds had earned you an eternity in Hell, you wished to avoid your fate so you asked Ravel to remove your mortality, it worked but caused you to lose your memories, your mortality wished to remain separate so it actively sought to keep murdering you and keep you from regaining knowledge, and now at the end you are ready to reclaim or defeat your mortality and accept your fate, freeing the other souls you torment with your existence.

There's a fairly lengthy conversation with TTO, though not as long or complex as the encounter with Ravel. In my first playthrough I had selected the option to sacrifice myself. This time, I selected a dialogue option to resurrect one of my companions, opting for Falls-From-Grace. I hadn't realized that this would directly lead into the final battle. That fight was cool; you get a ridiculous amount of XP right before the endgame, particularly if you bring the Bronze Sphere with you, so I had jumped from, like, Level 16 prior to entering the Fortress to Level 25 before fighting TTO. That brought my spellcasting level all the way up from Sphere 6 to Sphere 9, unlocking the incredibly cool and powerful highest-level spells. These reminded me of the Summons from Final Fantasy games: each plays an FMV showing an elaborate otherworldly force unleashing a gigantic conflagration of pure energy that annihilates the battlefield, often dealing upwards of 10 HP of damage to TTO. The fight mostly consisted of TNO and FFG taking turns kiting TTO around the battlefield while the other casted spells (awesome powerful offensive attacks from TNO or buffs and debuffs from FFG). I'd worked my way all down to, like, Sphere 4 of my TNO spells, then jumped to Magic Missile and finally took down TTO.

I'd beaten the game, but was mildly disappointed with myself, as I'd missed the option to resolve the final confrontation in the dialogue. So I peeked one last time at a walkthrough, reloaded the last autosave and went through it again. There are apparently multiple ways to do this (one high CHA, one high INT, one high WIS); I think I followed the CHA path, first convincing TTO that I was willing to sacrifice myself, then convincing him that the Fortress was actually a prison, and finally compelling him to merge back with me.

This unlocks the "good" ending, which has the same very final video, but quite a bit more content before it: another FMV clip of the merging, and, more significantly, final conversations with all of your companions. This provides some really nice closure, particularly Dakkon's long-deferred freedom; it also includes the closest FFG ever gets to a romance, when she points out that a lifetime is less than forever and promises to find you on the Lower Planes. (I do really, really like the remaining ambiguity and mystery around FFG. You never do find out what she wrote in her diary, and all her statements about you are very carefully constructed.) It's very bittersweet but satisfying to free your companions from their bonds of torment to you and return them safely to Sigil, before you yourself enter the damnation of the endless Blood War.

END SPOILERS

I like games that make me feel something when they're over. Sometimes that feeling is "Yay, that was awesome!" Sometimes that feeling is wistfulness, or enthusiasm, or curiosity. Planescape: Torment gives me a feeling that's particularly strong and particularly hard to define. There's maybe a sense of awe, of humility, of... well, yeah, regret. I feel contemplative and quiet, with a lingering attachment that's less concerned with what happened than with what it meant. PS:T is a gross game, and also beautiful, violent and quiet, something that sticks in your brain like a steel key in your intestines. I'll wait for my memories to fade, and will play it again a decade from now.

Kickedstarter

Man, I really should have waited another 12 hours before publishing my last Kickstarter post. Two big bombshells dropped that have direct relevance: a revelation and a promise.


For starters, Harebrained Schemes released their first look at a running, alpha version of the game. They run and talk their way through a good chunk of a mission, chatting along the way about what we're looking at, the various systems being demonstrated, what's particularly cool, and so on. I highly recommend checking it out if you're interested in the project. It looks surprisingly good for a relatively low-budget game... details like the Seattle rain add a ton to the atmosphere, and I love how the character designs look. That combination of simple model and detailed facial portrait was magic for games like Baldur's Gate (and, yes, Planescape: Torment), and I think it's a really smart direction to take.

Almost immediately after releasing the video, Harebrained announced that they were allowing backers to upgrade their pledge levels. I thought that was interesting. I'm not sure exactly what to make of it. Obviously since it's just optional, anyone who wants to give them more money will presumably be happy with the opportunity. Though, I suspect that the upper tiers that involve creating new NPCs or items or the like may feel less integrated if they're claimed at this stage, rather than prior to development. It does seem like a "safer" move to make now than it was during the initial pledge phase; now that they've brought the game to, say, 80% completion, backers have much more confidence in the success of the project and a much clearer idea of what the actual game is. But, as far as I can tell they're only allowing the increases of pledges, not newcomers, so people have already voted with their wallets; it would be more discouraging if someone could come in 18 months later and get the same reward as a day-one true believer.

From Harebrained Schemes' perspective, there's a pretty clear advantage to re-opening pledge levels: it increases their funding, and gives them more money to finish the game. I imagine that's a good thing... if it lets them devote more resources to QA, and to polishing, and to creating sample missions, and all the other stuff that makes the final product sing, then that's all good.



A separate Kickstarter was also announced, one that I had a hunch would be coming soon: a new game from Richard Garriott, creator of the Ultima franchise and one of the godfathers of both computer RPGs and PC games in general. I'd signed up a few days ago for a "secret announcement" type thingy; it seemed clear that it would be for a new game, and I was right in suspecting that it would involve Kickstarter.

I'm a bit ashamed to say that I haven't [yet!] backed it. I regularly cite the Ultima series as the most formative series for me, as well as one of my favorites; I have particularly strong affection for Ultimas VI and VII in particular.

There are so many things that Garriott trailblazed. Zork predates Ultima, but Ultima pioneered applying a D&D-style rule-based system to a computer game; it had some of the very first graphics ever for a PC game; Ultima was one of the first games ever to tell a story (you'd be hard-pressed to find an actual story in the original Zork); Ultima IV was arguably the first game to actually explore deeper issues like morality; Ultima Underworld was the first FPS RPG, and was years ahead of its time with features like FPS companions, NPCs, and true three-dimensional levels; Wing Commander was one of the first games ever to use full-motion video; and Ultima Online, while not the first MMO, was the largest of its time and popularized many genre tropes that are still in use today.

That said, Garriott has been largely out of sight for over a decade. He was sadly a pioneer in yet another way: building an awesome gaming company that was acquired by EA and then absolutely ruined. It's a story that has been repeated countless times since: EA insists on churning out games at a faster pace; they release games in buggy states; a franchise loses its way, feeling rushed and with a weaker story; over time, your love for the great franchise starts to dim; sales fall as gamers turn away from the increasingly poor releases; and, finally, EA kills off the company. Origin was the first, and since then we've seen it repeated with Bullfrog, Maxis, Westwood Studios and Mythic, and we're all praying that Bioware escapes that fate.

Since leaving Origin/EA, Garriott is mostly known for creating Tabula Rasa, which unfortunately is best known as a fascinating failure of an MMO. Initially envisioned as a means to link together Eastern and Western players, it massively overshot its schedule, releasing after about six years in development and closing down two years later. Well, actually, Garriott is probably best known now for non-gaming purposes: being the first commercial space passenger, and the first second-generation space traveler, and building elaborate mansion castles.

So, while I'm profoundly grateful to Garriott for all he has contributed to the field of gaming, I'm not feeling terribly optimistic that he will deliver a great new game. Other successful kickstarter projects have become successful by essentially promising a second version of something people love. Torment is a great example of that: it's set in a different universe and based on a new rule-set, but everything about the project's promotion specifically references the terrific, groundbreaking things the team did in Planescape, and promises to deliver an experience that will make you feel similar to how you felt playing that earlier game. (Adam Heine put this very well in a comment on a recent Kickstarter update. The update made some vague references to how the game would treat relationships, which is a matter of intense concern among some fans. After frantic posts worrying about exactly what this meant, Adam wrote, "When in doubt, you can usually assume we will do things like we did in PST." That's a good line, and also something that should really help soothe the neurotic concerns that tend to bubble up whenever you treat an update to a beloved property.) Shadowrun took an opposite approach: they wanted to significantly modify the gameplay (modern graphics, no matrix, user-created missions), but kept the setting virtually identical (old-school Shadowrun set in the 2050s, instead of the more updated 2070s or a re-adjusted future based on today and not on projections from the 1980s). Again, people who had played the old Shadowrun console games or the pen-and-paper RPGs had a great feeling for the setting, and could back the project in the hopes of being able to re-visit that universe.

In contrast, after reading through the kickstarter for Shroud of the Avatar, watching the videos, and scanning through a few interviews, I'm still a bit baffled at what exactly the game experience will be like. I don't fundamentally "get" what he's proposing here... so, it's a multiplayer game, but it can be played offline as well? And it's a shared, persistent world? But we'll only encounter a few people at a time? And we'll pay taxes (with real money) on properties we buy?

Garriott built his reputation on innovating, and so it does make sense that he would be trying something new and unique that hasn't been done before. It may even be awesome. But personally, I tend to process new things by mapping them back onto things I've previously encountered, and I'm having a hard time understanding what he's going for here.

It would be easier for me if, say, he wanted to make a new single-player game set in Brittannia; I would probably back that in a heartbeat. But, Garriott no longer owns his own creation, since he sold it to EA, and thus he can't make a new game set there. I would also go for a game that invoked Ultima VII: a party-based game, set in an open fantasy world, played in a third person overhead view, with an intricate plot, and fairly modern graphics and sound. And while I personally wouldn't back an MMO, I'm sure there would be a huge audience for people who miss UO's lived-in world, which promoted community and ownership over the WoW model of stat advancement, grinding, and clans.

I'm definitely watching this campaign with interest, and I dearly hope that it turns out to be a terrific game - I'll be one of the first to buy it if it does. It's kind of hard for me to back right now, though.

To be honest, the game also suffers from poor timing. I imagine that Garriott has been planning this for a while, hence the Lord British secret announcement mailing list and such. However, since it was announced only a few days after Torment, I think a lot of oxygen had already left the room. For starters, Torment was a huge success story: the fastest Kickstarter to ever hit a million dollars (even beating the Ouya console), and on pace to become one of the best-funded game projects ever (currently at #6 in Gaming, with more than three weeks left to go). Shroud of the Avatar has put in very respectable numbers, but as of this writing they haven't yet reached their one-million-dollar goal; I'm sure they'll hit it, but it hasn't exploded like Torment did.

There may be some overlap between the games, too, so people with limited Kickstarting budgets who already pledged for Torment may be more reluctant to back Shroud of the Avatar as well. The games aren't all that similar: Torment is proudly single-player ("There is no total this Kickstarter could reach that would lead us to implement multiplayer"), and will take a novelistic approach, while Shroud of the Avatar is... some single/multi-player hybrid thing? Planescape: Torment came out in 1999, while Ultima's most celebrated games spanned the 1980s to the early 1990s, so I suspect Torment's target audience may skew slightly younger (though the enduring popularity of Ultima Online may somewhat equalize those demographics). Still, both games are fantasy RPGs, and in that respect they are conceivably fighting for the same entertainment dollars.

Still... as I said in my previous post, one of the things I love most about Kickstarter is the collegial atmosphere it fosters, not just between creators and backers, but between creators. You might think that inXile would get miffed that Garriott jumped in while their campaign was running, or Garriott might be bummed that Brian Fargo stole his thunder. I don't know what they think in private, but in public interviews both leaders are respectful and appreciative towards one another, claiming to be pleased at each others' successes. Anyways. It reinforces my ideal of the Kickstarter model being about focusing on creativity rather than competition, and growing the pie so everyone can feast on the long tail. Erm, that metaphor may have gotten away from me.

Regardless: while I'm not backing the Shroud campaign at the moment, I'm delighted it's running and pleased to see it doing so well. Hopefully people with more vision than me can help join in and make it succeed.

Sticks and stones may break my bones...

This past Saturday I was blessed with an overcast, rainy day. Not one to let such a thing go to waste, I spent the day powering through the final quarter or so of Planescape: Torment. I thought I'd share my thoughts here now that the game has finished.

I'm wondering how spoiler-aware to be. This game is such a relic (created in 1999, commercially unsuccessful, no sequel coming) that I'd expect me to be one of the last people who will ever play it. That said, at least two readers of this blog have expressed interest in playing it, so I'll try and be considerate. Overall impressions first, and the meaty reaction inside a spoiler block.

I've gotten at this a bit before but I would like to reiterate: this game is incredibly dark. First of all, it is dark in visual design. Virtually all the characters, environments and items are mixtures of brown, black and grey. The overall feeling is one of squalor and filth. Secondly, it is dark in tone. There is almost no humor here, and what little humor there is usually deals with decapitation and dismemberment. Finally, it is dark in philosophy. The game is pretty nihilistic, and the things you're motivated to do are very different from things that motivate us in ordinary life.

Let me expand on that last point a bit. Often times, the motivation in a fantasy game is the same as a motivation we would feel in our own lives, but magnified to a grander scale. For example, we tend to value family, and in some games you need to rescue your relatives from the Dark Lord; we value country, and in games you need to save it from annihilation; we value truth, and in games you need to solve the Big Mystery. In Planescape: Torment (henceforth Torment), the player character's motivations feel wholly alien: he seeks annihilation, oblivion, the ending of things.

Almost all this post will be about the plot and philosophy, so I should address mechanics before I forget it. The controls are pretty annoying. It's stuck between BG1 and BG2, and unlike BG2 there isn't a convenient way to discover the containers on a screen, so you'll need to mouse over each and every barrel before finding if any of them have stuff inside. Combat is fine, though the party AI is weak. I was generally much happier with combat earlier in the game; when you get party members with ranged attacks, your melee fighters no longer charge enemies, so there's a lot of micromanagement of positioning to keep your weak characters from getting slaughtered.

One bright visual spot is the magic spells. I don't think I cast any offensive magic until about halfway through the game, and when I finally did, I was extremely impressed. The animations are wonderful, looking far more impressive than the rest of the game.

In a way, it's almost a shame that there isn't more combat. I mean, yeah, it was nice to play for days and days without ever needing to fight, but when you did fight (with magic) it seemed so colorful (brilliant red fire, stark blue lightning bolts) that it washes away the drab white-text-on-brown that fills half your screen for the majority of the game. The story is awesome, I love it, but once I had a couple of epic battles I realized how starved I was for color.

Combat is pretty much an afterthought. There are some places where you can fight, but if you really tried, you could probably get through the game only killing 5 or so enemies. You wouldn't be too penalized for that, either. Individual kills will often net you around 65 XP, versus the thousands of points you get from finishing quests or, heck, just talking with people. In that regard, this game curiously felt more civilized than most RPGs, the subject matter notwithstanding.

There is an unbelievable amount of conversation in this game. That's one of the only things I'd heard about Torment before starting, and I was still surprised. Virtually everything you do requires finding people and navigating through elaborate conversation trees to extract every bit of information.

That said, this is a place where their interface could have been improved. It's still basically the BG1 engine, which was fine for the conversations in that game, but can get unwieldy here. The text window takes up half the screen, and you still need to click every paragraph to advance. When choosing your response, your options can go up to 20 or more different topics, requiring some awkward scrolling to find what you want. The content is good enough that it feels worth it, but it shouldn't have to be an obstacle; Bioware should have invested in a new conversation engine for this game, even if they kept everything else.

A point of occasional annoyance is the quest log, which shares the same big problem that Morrowind has. When you get a quest it tells you who gave it to you, but not where they are; therefore, once you finally finish it, it can be really hard to remember exactly where to go to finish it. Even worse, in Torment sometimes the quest will be marked as "completed" and removed from your active log once you do what you were supposed to, even though there might be additional XP and items waiting once you report back to the person who gave it to you.

The character selection is good. Each NPC is unique (both in personality and in ability) and interesting. Like BG2 they occasionally talk with one another, and some especially like or dislike others. They also are frequently involved in your conversations with non-party NPCs, and might open up new conversations or provoke them to attack. You can develop relationships with them; I got in the habit of periodically chatting with them about our quest, and found that they often had a lot to say. This isn't just good for the fun of it; by doing certain threads you can increase their abilities or otherwise help them out.

The music is pretty good, nothing spectacular but nothing embarrassing either. There's only one theme that I really like, which you can hear early in the game and is later repeated. For the most part the music is atmospheric and moody. In a lot of places there isn't music at all, just background noise.

Hm. I think I've covered my bases here. Now, for the next section I'll be talking about things you find out in the game, but which don't directly address the main plot. A lot of it is probably old news to people who play D&D. So, I will call these

MINOR SPOILERS

The metaphysics of Torment are kind of fun, and I'd like to go into them a bit. As far as I can tell this is based off D&D books and not original to the game. If any of you are more familiar with it than I, please forgive any mistakes I'm making in describing how everything fits together.

There are many dimensions. The first of them is called "Prime," and roughly corresponds to what we would call "The Real World." It is populated by mortals who are born, live, and die.

Beyond Prime, you have the Planes. Where Prime is a mottled place with clashing emotions, beliefs, cultures and motives, each Plane is a more unified place that represents a principle or orientation. For example, one plane is "Limbo," and is a manifestation of the "Chaotic Neutral" alignment. Limbo is filled with chaos, with matter appearing and disappearing, and whorls in the ether regularly sweeping away anything which is built. Opposite of Limbo is Mechanus, the manifestation of the "Lawful Neutral" alignment. Mechanus is filled with gears and levers and machines. Everything is orderly and logical. The main race there is the Modrons, perfectly logical robots who oversee the order of the plane.

The planes are separate universes, and so one cannot, say, fly a space ship between them, but they are still capable of influencing one another. The beliefs and actions of those living in Prime influence what happens in the Planes; in turn, the Planes can affect what happens in Prime. For example, if enough people in Prime believe in a god, that god will be created in the Planes. The more people who believe in him, the stronger he will become; if, over time, they change their idea of what that god is like, he will change to fit the belief. The god's strength is greatest in his own realm, but with enough followers, he will be able to influence events in other planes, or even on Prime itself. To kill a god, one could travel to his home and fight him in full glory; or, one could simply convince enough people to not believe in him, and, like the monster under the bed, he will go away.

Powerful magics can actually move people between planes. If you've played BG2, the company of Players are very clearly from the Planes. In Torment, such travel is usually accomplished by means of Portals, wormholes that stretch across space and even dimensions.

This isn't just background; this philosophy has a huge impact on the game itself. The power of belief is extremely potent and should not be ignored. I read an FAQ after beating the game and learned that, if you lie enough times in the game and say "My name is Adahn," enough people will believe in Adahn, and later in the game a new character called Adahn will actually appear. This sort of thing is realistic here on the planes, far from Prime, and makes all sorts of strange events possible.

Besides belief, the setting of the game means you'll encounter tons of archetypes, and unlike in normal games, they don't feel cheesy, just natural. I mean, if you met a single-minded champion of Justice in, say, a Final Fantasy game, you'd be a little disappointed if there weren't any other complications in his character. But here, yes, he actually is a MANIFESTATION of JUSTICE itself, the avatar of an abstract principle. This isn't to say characters are all one dimensional. Some of the most poignant characters are those who struggle against their natures and try to become something else, or whose experiences have changed them from what they were. But even when something is one-dimensional, it is that is such a stark and uncompromising way that it is enjoyable.

Changing gears slightly: without giving too much away, I'd like to give some general gameplay tips to people who are thinking of playing the game and would like to avoid making bad decisions.

• Save early and often. After the first section of the game I didn't run into many gameplay bugs, but you don't want to risk it. And with conversation so important in the game, you'll probably want to have a game to go back to if you accidentally offended someone or otherwise messed up a quest.
• You control your alignment in the game. Probably 99% of this comes from your conversations. Lying makes you chaotic, telling the truth or making vows makes you lawful. If you say something like "I will help you" it'll make you good, if you say "What's in it for me?" it'll make you evil. If you do a lot of good stuff early on, you can do some evil stuff later and retain your alignment.
• More on alignment: mostly it's just what kind of character you want to play. There are a few things that are only available to certain alignments, but nothing crucial for the game. Being Lawful Good allows you to use one of the best weapons in the game. (If you'd like to do this, give yourself Edged weapons.) Being Evil gives you some other good weapons. There's one faction you can only join if you're Chaotic, but it's not really worth it. I was Neutral Good for most of the game and ended it Chaotic Good. It seems like your alignment should affect your relationship with NPCs but it didn't seem like it did; Lawful members didn't seem to care when I became Chaotic.
• There are two points in the game where you are teleported to another Plane using an item in your inventory. In both cases, you will be able to find and invite another party member, but when you do so you risk abandoning one behind; if you do this, I think they're lost forever (well, once you go back to Sigil). You MIGHT want to only take four NPCs with you in these cases, though it's possible you'll need all five. Don't stress out about this too much - no single NPC is indispensable.
• You can increase your stats whenever you level up. Wisdom is definitely the best (I wish I'd figured this out first) - it opens more conversation threads, helps you recover memories (which give you more experience), and gives a bonus to all future XP you receive. Consider getting your Wisdom all the way to 25 (either naturally or with tattoos and other items) before you invest in other stats.
• It's often better to have one really high stat than a bunch of mediocre ones. Consider raising either your INT or your CHR really high instead of splitting between them. A high INT will sometimes let you logically persuade a person, while a high CHR will let you emotionally persuade them, but a medium of both will get you nothing. This doesn't apply often, but for really important things, you'll want a high stat.

OK, those are the big gotchas. One more topic to cover before hitting the plot.

Names in this game are fascinating. In keeping with the general metaphysics of the planes, everyone has a name that indicates their essence. There's a zombie called Post where people hang notices; there's a skull called Morte; there's a criminal printer called Scofflaw Penn. Sometimes it gets absurd; obviously you won't believe something Lyra tells you. It's less clear when names are given in a non-Common language, but even then, if you can find the name's translation you'll have an excellent idea of what the person is like.

Given all that, it's fascinating that your player character is called The Nameless One. I think there are a lot of ways to consider this. First, one can think that he is unchained from destiny; not having a name, he is free to make his own choices and determine his nature. It feels very significant that you are the only person whose alignment can shift. Secondly, so much of the game is about wanting to KNOW who you are; in this context, it's unfortunate that you are Nameless, because that leaves you with no information about your self, no sense of history or purpose... no YOU.

There are other cases where names make me really curious. The big example I'm thinking of now is Falls-From-Grace, a reformed Succubus. I've been trying to parse that almost since I met her and cannot. She is no longer in the Abyss, but wouldn't she be better called "Rises-From-Damnation"? Or is the name more about what she DOES than what she IS? One can consider the name ironically, I suppose... "grace" being considered a pure or natural state. Still, this game doesn't seem real big on irony. I just don't know. Without this very complex and faithful system of names, though, her particular example wouldn't grab me nearly as strongly.

All right, time to tackle the plot. We now enter the territory of

MAJOR SPOILERS

This is FAR from the first game to use amnesia as a major plot device. I can well understand why it is so tempting to developers; amnesia gives you the best of both worlds, both identifying the player with the character (because, heck, neither of you know what's going on) and giving you a rich and vibrant backstory to explore (because the character did a lot before getting amnesia).

Each game, though, uses amnesia to different ends. Final Fantasy VII uses a very localized kind of amnesia which pays off in the second-biggest shock of the game. The Metal Gear games exploit amnesia to heighten paranoia.

In Torment, your amnesia is probably the single most important thing in the game. It's not just an obstacle to get around; it's something you explore and pursue. For most of the game you just want to know why you can't remember things. This pays off in the game, too; regaining a memory you had previously lost is surprisingly satisfying.

The overall effect is wonderful, sinister and ominous. I think the best example of this is Ravel's question, "What can change the nature of a man?" By the time you actually hear it, late in the game, you (the player, not The Nameless One) will have spent a lot of time pondering that question and turning it over. The echoes of your previous lives both reveal and obscure, giving you little snatches like this question without providing the context you need to make sense of it.

Ah, and a quick side note on Ravel: how cool is her name? You first hear murmured references to her early on, and as the story continues you begin to realize just how important she is, perhaps even thinking that she might be the Final Boss. But it wasn't until I started talking with her that I finally "got" her name, which sent me off on a kick about the English language. If we can talk about unraveling, why not raveling? I love the mental image she conjures up, like a spider, tying things together.

Topic hop: I was pleased to see them continuing (or, I suppose, beginning) the romance tradition from BG2. I wooed Annah in my game; I'm guessing Falls-from-Grace is also a potential lover. That said, BG2's system felt far more satisfying. Here you just had a couple of conversations past a certain plot point. In BG2, it took a long, long time, with conversations initiated both by you and your lover, and the resolution of some special events and plot points to bring to a conclusion. Anyways... yeah. That's a fun aspect, and I wish more games would take advantage of it. It's those little touches that make you feel like it's a ROLE-PLAYING game and not a "kill monsters and loot their gold" game.

My party at the end of the game was myself, Vhailor, Annah, Ignus, Nordom and Falls-from-Grace. As always I wish I had more slots in my party. I reluctantly left Dak'kon behind on Carceri (right?) to get Vhailor; Dak'kon was one of my favorite characters personality-wise, but he just wasn't that good of a fighter or a mage, and wasn't doing much for me in combat. Annah had similarly felt like a dead weight for much of the game - there are far fewer locks and traps for a thief to contend with here than in the BG games - but around the time I got Vhailor I had finally come to realize how useful she was as a scout, and even an assassin. My standard combat technique was to put The Nameless One and Vhailor in front as shields, with Nordom and Ignus behind as artillery and Fall-From-Grace in the backfield for relief. Annah would go stealth, find a group of enemies, backstab one, and then lead the rest on a chase back to my main party, which would mow them down. Sometimes she could do this a few times before our forces collided, and it wasn't unusual for me to resolve potentially lethal conflicts with hardly any damage on my side.

The other name that isn't there is Morte. He was fairly amusing; I gave him up to get Ignus, because he seemed to overlap too much with The Nameless One in combat purpose. Still, he had his qualities... he was the only Good-aligned character, the only one with a sense of humor, and did a lot of the intra-party chatter that I enjoy.

I was briefly very excited when, near the end of the game, I met some earlier incarnations of mine. This all felt very Freudian and clever. There was the "Practical Incarnation," who was obviously plot-focused; there was also the "Good Incarnation" and the "Paranoid Incarnation," the latter of who was obviously crazy. I thought at the time that this was probably the result of the way I had been playing, since I was Chaotic Good by this point; I figured I was speaking with aspects of my personality. I read the FAQ after beating the game, though, and was disappointed to learn that you always meet those three incarnations no matter what. Pity.

And for the very ending of the game... wow. You know, like I was talking about before regarding motivations in RPGs, there also seems to be a limited number of acceptable endings. There's the Dragon Warrior I ending: "Congratulations, you have defeated the Dragon Lord and saved us all! You are Now the King of the Land!" ending. There's the Zelda ending: "Congratulations, you have defeated Gannon and saved Hyrule! Now you can go back to being a pig farmer again!" There's the Ultima ending: "You have shown us all the path to enlightenment! Now you can return to Earth!" In each case the ending is something the player would want, whether that is power, peace or normalcy.

But, geez, the ending of Planescape: Torment? "Congratulations, you have recovered your mortality! You are now damned to spend all eternity in Hell!" I mean, wow. I'd sort of been mentally preparing myself for just dying at the end of the game, since that seemed to be the direction things were going in, but it ended up being way worse than I had thought.

So that kind of got me thinking. Why did I still feel so good after beating the game? The mere thought of going through a fraction of what my character went though was horrifying, and the end of the game just magnified all that to an even more gruesome extent. Part of it is likely because I've been programmed well by video games, and automatically produce a rush of endorphins or whatever when I defeat one. In that case it's the fact that I have "won" which I'm celebrating, not what actually happens within the text.

In another respect, though, it's not the victory that's important, just the fact that it's over. I'm used to playing games in fantasy worlds that are more attractive than my own: even though they may have aspects that are horrifying, the worlds themselves almost always feel elevated above my own: more exciting, more clever, more colorful and magical. My experience playing Torment was the exact opposite: in every conceivable respect I enjoy my own life more than the one portrayed in that game. Oddly enough, I still tended to feel better after playing it, but I think for very different reasons. In a typical RPG I get on a certain high in the game, connected to my admiration for the world it presents, and that pleasure stays with me once I end the game. Here, I felt like a man being led out of a cave; the contrast between the dismal world I was playing in and the wonderful world I am living in was so great that, in an odd way, the game made me appreciate things more. No matter how bad a day I have, at least people aren't ripping out my internal organs, killing my friends and refusing to let me die. Life's pretty good out here.

Guitar Hero: Torment

I've been playing two radically different games lately. I often try to join them together, playing one immediately after the other, because otherwise one mood will dominate the other. It's like, I dunno, pairing a sweet wine with a sour cookie or something.

The first game is Guitar Hero. It's sort of been on my radar for a while, mainly due to the pumping it's gotten on Penny Arcade. For a game like this which falls outside of my normal genres and points of reference, I'll usually wait a while so I get a chance to hear second opinions, later reactions, broader reviews, and hopefully a drop in price. The last element didn't look like it would be coming soon, but all the former ones were present, so I figured, what the heck? It sounded like a fun game and would add some welcome variety to my RPG-heavy library.

For those who aren't part of the VG news circuit, Guitar Hero is a game built around a peripheral. When you buy the game you get a plastic guitar, with some buttons and stuff where you would normally find frets and strings. You then use this guitar to "rock out" with the songs in the game proper; you're playing the guitar part, obviously, while the rest of the "band" handles the rest of the music.

These sorts of games are very popular in Japan. I've heard cool stories about how these games can actually be linked together. You know how, in an arcade, if you have four people starting a race together you can race on the same track against each other? Imagine that, except it's in a virtual rock club, and two of you are on guitars, one on drums, and another singing. It's kind of like that. This has never really caught in here in the States, but the folks at Red Octane (who create what are bar none the best dance mats for DDR) and Harmonix (who did Frequency and Karaoke Revolution) figured out that the time was right; the market has been sufficiently penetrated by "rhythm games" and the like that it no longer seems COMPLETELY absurd that people will pay money to play a fake guitar.

At first I was struck by the similarities in gameplay between DDR and GH. In both cases you have blocks falling down the screen, and need to hit the button when the block reaches a certain point. The main difference is that, in DDR, you're hitting a spot with your foot, and in GH you're touching a fret button with your finger (while strumming with your other hand). Now that I've played the game way too long, though, I'm just as struck by how many differences there are, which are the result of the fact that dancing is very different from playing guitar. One of the most common things in DDR is when you keep one foot in a certain spot while moving around the other. There's nothing analogous in GH, just because people don't play like that - you have chords and long notes, but you never switch chords in the middle of a long note.

The music is just amazing. A lot of it is harder than what I prefer to listen to, but it's wonderful to play with. The lineup is stunning - Black Sabbath's "Iron Man," Jimi Hendrix's "Spanish Castle Magic," the Ramones' "I Wanna Be Sedated," "Take Me Out" by Franz Ferdinand, "Sharp Dressed Man" by ZZ Top, "Texas Flood" by Stevie Ray Vaughan... actually, look up the game if you want a full list, it's really solid. I appreciate the variety between old and new songs, and they all definitely rock.

The feedback is impressive, too. In DDR, when you miss a step, nothing really happens besides a word popping up. If you do it too many times, people begin booing you. Here, though, missing a note means that you just don't hear the guitar play during that part; it's really obvious and sounds bad, which is a big incentive to do it right. My one complaint is that I'd like more variety in the "messing up" sound; it always sounds like a non-electrified plink, when it should just sound like a wrong note.

Every song is great, but the most fun for me to play is probably "Cochise" by Audioslave. I'm actually not a big Audioslave fan, but playing this song is really, really fun.

As is often the case for these sorts of games, it's the career mode that carries me away. You start off playing gigs in basement parties, and as your reputation increases you expand your set list and move into larger venues. In advanced modes, you get cash by clearing each song, and can spend this money on new guitars, new songs, guitar skins, and more. This provides a great sense of progress and accomplishment. You get more cash for higher scores, so there's incentive to keep trying that hard song instead of just barely beating it and then moving on.

There are different difficulty levels, and the change is HUGE. I'm reminded of the leaps in DDR, where going from Easy to Normal was traumatic for me. Here, on Easy mode you just need to manage three of the five frets. Going to Medium adds the fourth fret and a world of pain. I still haven't gotten used to it yet; you need to choose between using your pinky to (awkwardly, painfully) strike that button, or move your hand to use a stronger finger but risk losing your place on the neck. I'm struggling through, but just getting 3 out of 5 stars on most songs. I have one song left before I "beat" the game at this level - "Bark at the Moon" by Ozzy Osbourne - but I'll be spending lots more time trying to get higher scores and playing the bonus songs, and just having fun rocking out. There's a big chance that I'll never make it to Hard mode, and I'm perfectly fine with that. (I've never attempted Oni on DDR, either.)

I can't wait to try two-player mode. That's going to be AWESOME.

This game is one of those things that feels very frustrating to describe, just because it isn't something you like for its features; it's something you like for the pure joy of participating in the amazing music you hear. I love the freedom of pacing back and forth in front of the TV, hammering on the guiar, tilting it vertically and rocking out. There's nothing quite like it.

"Joy" is a good word to summarize my Guitar Heros experience. It is also the opposite of what you feel when playing Planescape: Torment. I'm on the third disc now, not sure how much is left to go, but I've done enough to feel comfortable writing a post, so here it is.

Some background: This game was created by Black Isle, the same people who did the phenomenal Baldur's Gate games. It is powered by their Infinity Engine, which powered those games, and was released in 1999, between BG1 and BG2. It is set in the Planescape multiverse; I'm not very well-versed in D&D, but I believe this is part of the D&D multiverse.

It's a pretty good game, despite some annoying technical mishaps. Apparently this is one of the big reasons why the game wasn't a success; it was simply buggy and nearly unplayable. Before even starting a game I patched it up, and even with that I'm regularly running across bugs. A bad one came in the very first minute: when I tried to open a door it removed the key from my inventory but didn't unlock the door, so I would have been stuck if I hadn't very thoughtfully saved my game immediately at the beginning.

There are other reasons why it didn't take off. One thing I like about it, but many others probably hate, is that it's incredibly text-heavy. Sure, you spend some time collecting items and fighting monsters, but virtually everything important happens in conversation, and it's through dialog that you gain the most important experience and abilities. A lot of the time it feels more like a mystery game than an RPG, and rather than saving before combat I now save before talking to anyone.

The first two strikes against the game, then, are its bugs and the reams of text to read. The third is its relentlessly dark and morbid tone. I'll get into this more below, but this is probably the darkest game I've ever played. This shows in the art, the character design, the plot, the dialog, even the weapons. And unlike a lot of other dark games, here it isn't undercut with humor or confined to a few dramatic situations. From the moment you start the game until... well, at least partway into Disc 3, you're surrounded by misery and suffering.

I don't want to scare you off and say that the game is bad - I'm still playing it, after all - but playing it is a pretty heady experience. It really does affect my mood, and after the first few sessions I'm now careful not to play it for more than an hour or two at a time.

Minor Spoilers

Your character is The Nameless One, and he's probably my favorite thing about the game. First of all, he has a fascinating backstory. You start the game with amnesia (which has been used in a few other games to good effect) and you, the player, try to uncover your past while you, the character, tries to do the same. One of the first things you discover is that you are an immortal. You're not a god or anything (at least, I don't think so); you simply cannot die. The game starts when you wake up in a morgue; unlike in Shadowrun, you really WERE dead, but you can't stay dead. You are covered with tattoes; this element reminded me of "Memento"; your character knows that the more he dies the more memories he will lose, so he tattoes the most impotant information on himself so he won't forget. That's one of the most dreadful things about the game; you come to understand just how long this has been going on, possibly hundreds or thousands of years. Over and over again the Nameless One (so called because he can't remember his name, though he may not even have one) comes close to finding whatever he is seeking for, then is cast down and starts again from the beginning. In his wake he leaves the tormented souls of those he has drawn around him in his quest. That's another plaintive element of the game: you've travelled in a party before, as characters do in all RPG games, and others died to advance your quest; and now you don't even know what that quest was.

Obviously, the background is pretty unique for an RPG. As David has mentioned, The Nameless One sounds like a villain, and in many ways your character looks like he could be (or, heck, IS) a villain. After being constantly killed and resurrected he looks like a zombie, with ashen skin and glazed eyes, wearing a loincloth and a sash of bones. The further you dig into your history you discover that in previous incarnations you basically WERE a villain, who delighted in torturing and killing innocents; in others you were heroic, acting kindly while pursuing your quest. And in this game, it's up to you: unlike the Baldur's Gate games you don't choose your alignment at the beginning, it is malleable based on your actions, and you have ample opportunities to move between good and evil, chaos and law. (My current alignment is Neutral Good, though I keep skipping between that and Chaotic Good.) Your class is malleable too; you can become a Thief by traning in it, and I think I'll be able to become a Mage later. Just to be clear, this isn't multiclassing or dual classing, you actually CHANGE your class. Anyways, it's unusual to have someone with so much power and such a dark background as the protagonist in an RPG.

Fortunately, the uniqueness extends beyond the background and into the gameplay. They aren't kidding when they say that you're an immortal. If you ever die in a fight, you don't need to load your game; your body falls, is probably dragged somewhere else (the morgue pays cash for dead bodies) and you wake back up with full health. This has really changed the way I play the game compared to other RPGs, in fact kind of the opposite of the BG games, where if your main character died the game ended but if companions die you can resurrect them. Here I regularly sacrifice the Nameless One to save the life of a wounded comrade, and almost never bother saving before fighting.

To keep the pace of analogies going, this feels revolutionary on the same order of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. That game included a remarkable feature that allowed you to rewind time, so if you attempted a tricky jump and fell to your death, you could rewind back to before you tried the jump. In both cases, the games change a longstanding game convention and come out with a new system that feels infinitely less frustrating than anything that came before. After playing both of these I wish that more games were like this; having that escape keeps frustration from getting too high and lets you focus on the fun parts of the game. But, in both cases, the escaping-death feature flows organically from the story of the game, so it isn't something that would feel like it fit as well in other games.

Oh, and this game is really morbid. Incredibly macabre. You regularly abuse your body, ripping out an eyeball, letting someone chew on your leg, ripping off your entire arm at one point. This doesn't have huge consequences in the game - as an immortal, everything regenerates and heals - but it's pretty stomach-churning to read about. Oh, and there's one scene where you have someone open up your stomach and take out all your intestines so you can find a key or something that was in there. That was pretty gross.

The companions are kind of odd, too. The first one you meet is a flying skull named Morte (get it?). He's basically a chipper version of Murray the Talking Skull in the Monkey Island games, except he can move under his own power and is a fearsome fighter, attacking with all his teeth. Both skulls are incredibly talkative, though. I don't know my next two companions as well - there's Dak'kon, an elderly mage/warrior, and Annah, a tiefling thief. There's a bit of the party cross-chat here that I loved so much in BG2, though it's rarely amusing.

There are smaller changes, too. There's no armor in the game, at least that I've found yet; the Nameless One still has an Armor Class of 8. No swords, either. However, there are plenty of axes, hammers, clubs, fist weapons, and some daggers. The game designers took evident pleasure in letting you use odd items as weapons: a scalpel can be wielded as a dagger, a set of antlers can be swung as an axe, and an dismembered arm (to be fair, YOUR dismembered arm) is used as a powerful club.

The game takes place in a city called Sigil which doesn't exist in the prime universe. It's on top of an infinitely tall spire, supposedly in the middle of the multiverse, and is filled with doors into other universes. There's no sun or moon, just an alternately dim and light sky. You never go "outside", to forests or fields or even caves or mountains; the entire game (so far) takes place in or under the city, and it's a grimy, messy, ugly city. Think Shadowrun, but more organic and less mechanical. This is yet another game where the art impacts my mood. Being surrounded by squalor and ugliness in the game constantly increases the feelings of claustrophobia.

As a side note, if you've played BG2, I think the actors you met in the playhouse are meant to have come from the Planescape game. It's been a while since I did that so I'm not sure if they are specific characters in this game or not.

In one way the game is closer to Morrowind than BG. Planescape has factions which you join much like you do in Morrowind; you do a series of quests and eventually are initiated, gaining access to that faction's special stores, healing and other goodies. Well, I've only joined one so far, but it looks like I may be allowed to join more later on.

I actually don't feel like getting into the specifics of the plot right now, even behind a "major spoilers" tag. I may summarize it once I beat the game. Suffice to say that as time goes on you uncover more of your past and learn more about what's happening in Sigil. I still don't know what my quest is, what I ultimately need to do. I know I've made powerful enemies and am curious if that was inevitable or if I could have acted differently. I'll keep poking away at this and will report back once it's all done. I'm treating this game the same way I treat a lot of books, "It might not be very fun, but it's interesting, and I want to see where it's going."